Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Condon Excerpts

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

My Lords, I worry a little, because I do not quite understand some of the proposed legislation. It is very much about process, which is very important. However, it should also surely be about deterrents against wrongdoing. I recollect that, when I had responsibility for taking legislation through Parliament, some of which one or two noble Lords opposite will remember quite well, one of the things I had to constantly ask myself was, “What are the means of deterring people from wrongdoing?”.

This is about going to the High Court and all sorts of other things, with doctors doing this and that. Supposing there is wrongdoing, how do we deter it? At the moment, if somebody wrongfully puts pressure on, or wrongfully assists, a suicide, they know that the law is there and that its hand may fall on their shoulder. I may be wrong but, as I see it, if we enacted these measures we would only be adding to the procedures, not to the deterrents against wrongdoing.

I speak with some feeling. I have had the prime responsibility of the care of my wife for the last 30 years. She has been in constant pain. It is getting worse. She requires more and more care. I fear for the day when she will say again to me what she said to me a little while ago: “You know, you would be better off without me”. There are many ways in which pressure can be brought to bear to make people who are perhaps approaching the end of their lives—although I hope that my wife is not—to “do the decent thing”. These amendments do not do anything to avoid that, and that is what worries me.

[Lord Condon (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my registered interest in policing. I support the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and other noble Lords, for the reasons that he outlined. At Second Reading I expressed a wish that the involvement of the High Court was perhaps the way forward on this issue. Like many of your Lordships, I had the privilege and honour of sitting through the previous debates on this issue, and like everyone in this House, past and present, we felt enormous compassion and wanted to find a way through this issue, which resonated with the feelings out there in the wider community.

For my own part, I have never been able to be satisfied that abuse, coercion and the prospect of malpractice of the sort outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, were addressed in our previous attempts to deal with this tragic issue. However, we are now tantalisingly close to finding a way through this issue. It will assuage those of us who fear abuse, coercion, the right to die becoming the duty to die, and so on. Therefore I hope that we will find a way through this issue that involves judicial oversight and scrutiny.

At the moment I find myself favouring the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, in his amendments, as a medical-based approach but with judicial verification and oversight, because it is not quite so bureaucratic as the way forward suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. However, I hope we will find a way through this issue through judicial intervention.

[Lord Tebbit]

What does the noble Lord feel about the fact that a number of doctors who, quite wrongfully, signed chits, or whatever they are called, to allow sex-selective and frequently late abortion of patients whom they had never seen and whose names they did not know, have gone unpunished? Where is the deterrence to that?

[Lord Condon]

The noble Lord raises a very vital issue. We can and will address it in two ways: first, through the judicial oversight, and secondly, by amending Section 10, which at the moment has insufficient offences, but which can be amended to have a range of offences that will satisfy just the concern that the noble Lord has raised.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)]

My Lords, it is in the very best traditions of this House that there is standing room only at this debate on a Friday. It is entirely appropriate, is it not, given the profound issues that are involved? I have no doubt at all that the country will be watching and listening to this debate in a way in which it perhaps has not done since the last of these debates, because this is one in a series. Like other noble Lords, I have taken part in all those debates; I come at the subject from having spent six years in the early part of my legal career as a part-time assistant to a part-time coroner and occasionally deputising for him. I was very vividly thrown up against the issues that are at the root of this legislation. I have to confess—I see the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, sitting yonder—that whereas I was wholly unconvinced when the noble Lord started his pilgrimage, the Bill contains the sort of protections that could make it one which we should support, given that it blocks off the thin-end-of-the-wedge fears that many of us had formerly.

I will make only one major point. We do not want to go from a situation where, as now, you have to be rich enough to go to Switzerland to get some sort of justice in these complicated matters. However, we could be in a comparable if lesser dilemma because of the cost which will attach to going to the High Court—with representation, as one would have to have—and getting an order. I have no doubt that the cost will be more than most of us expect and more than some of us fear, and legal aid is now available only to people at a very low level of income, and it will leave at least 80% of the public of this country unsustained if they wish to use the remedies that the Bill will provide. That is not right in a matter of death. One of the things we need to contemplate is whether we have some special arrangements for this life and death matter.

Secondly, the noble Lord who produced the Bill has done wonderful work, and those who tabled the amendments—the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and my noble friend Lord Carlile—have also done great work. However, there is a huge number of problems at the back of either amendment; a great number of issues that have not been considered carefully, in the round, and reported on. I hope very much that we will not vote on these amendments now or indeed at all today, because we all need time to reflect on and contemplate them. However, I would like us to think about—and, if necessary, to form— an ad hoc group to report on whether one could not deal with the issue at the heart of these amendments just as well by having either a county court judge or a special panel of justices of the peace to determine the issues concerned. Some may think, “That’s not good enough”. As one who spent a lot of time in magistrates’ courts and county courts in years past, I do not hold that view. In some ways, given that the issues are—how shall I put it?—common-sense life experience issues that will have to be determined by whoever adjudicates on this, I am not so sure that a county court judge or a panel of magistrates might not be at least as good, competent and able to undertake the decisions involved.